Switching channels

As the world’s biggest broadcaster the BBC is spearheading the digital transformation of the television industry. Diana Milne meets the corporation’s Chief Technology Officer, former Yahoo exec John Linwood, to find out what the man in charge of the department behind iPlayer really thinks about the future of broadcasting.

“100 million - number of requests the iPlayer received in its first year”
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When John Linwood left the US search engine giant Yahoo to join the BBC earlier this year, he experienced something of a culture shock. Having spearheaded the development of some of Yahoo's most successful social networking products, African-born Linwood found himself in a very British institution with a very British approach to making changes: "Clearly American companies have a slightly different culture in terms of their approach to delivering things. In the BBC clearly there's a lot more governance because we're spending public money so we have to be squeaky clean about how we use it. Sometimes in the BBC people are slightly more cautious. They don't have that American jump in feet first attitude."  It soon  became clear to Linwood however that the pace of change underway at the BBC would not leave him standing still for long. His arrival coincided with a period of massive transition for the broadcaster in the wake of a digital revolution, which has transformed the way viewers access television content.

Entertainment on-demand

The most significant development has been the launch of BBC iPlayer, the broadcaster's on-demand online television channel which has been a phenomenal success, attracting over 100 million requests in its first year; around 700,000 a day on average. This, says Linwood, places heavy demands on the BBC's IT infrastructure: "One of the challenges we share with many other suppliers on the internet is that user demand on the systems changes. For instance, if we have a very popular show on iPlayer we get a huge peak in demand."

One such example that Linwood is particularly concerned about is the 2012 Olympics,  which the BBC has exclusive rights to distribute in the UK and which Linwood says is likely to be viewed mainly online because of the timing of the games: "One example that is keeping me awake at night is the 2012 Olympics. We know that people will be accessing it from their PCs or their phones because it will be on in the daytime so the BBC is going to have to build up a huge amount of infrastructure to support that." BBC iPlayer has also greatly increased the complexity of the BBC's IT infrastructure as it plugs into so many of its different systems such as scheduling, live stream and metadata systems, all of which feed data into the site. Costs too are an issue as the broadcaster must meet the increased demand for its online technology but without the luxury of being able to increase its budget, as a private sector counterpart would, through revenue from increased use of the service: "Traditionally, if the BBC broadcast to 10 million people for a particular show, it didn't actually cost any more than if only one million people watched that show. In the on-demand interactive world that is no longer true. However, the BBC is a fixed earnings company, we don't get any additional revenue if we get more users so we have to be really clever about how we deliver those services without incurring substantial extra costs."

The phenomenal success of iPlayer is just the beginning of the BBC's foray into digital media, says Linwood, who reveals that it is currently looking at ways to deliver its content via social networking media. This is subject however, to a detailed assessment of which programmes are best suited for social networking websites, says Linwood: "I think that clearly the BBC is looking at ways to reach its audience all the time. Part of our mission statement is; inform, educate and entertain. So that means social networking can be the right mechanism with which to reach the audience. We're looking at where our audiences actually are. Clearly if you want to reach Radio 1 listeners you're looking at social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. But if you want to reach Radio 3 listeners there are clearly not so many on Twitter."

Outside intervention

Although the BBC, traditionally, has developed its own home-grown technology, the increased complexity it now faces, means it is also working closely with outside vendors to find solutions to the  challenges posed by the digital media world. Linwood has recently instigated a new open technology strategy, which aims to make the tendering process simpler by providing potential vendors with more information about the details and technical specifications, which the corporation requires. He says he hopes this will encourage tendering by smaller technology companies, which could potentially provide more innovative and scalable solutions than the larger packaged solutions provided by major international vendors: "Historically we've worked with large vendors, which is great, because they have all the capability we need," says Linwood. "But one of the areas I'm focused on is how we drive greater innovation for the BBC in terms of our products and services. And part of that strategy is how the BBC can engage with small companies. Of course, large organisations can be creative as well, but when you're looking at emerging and leading edge technologies, very often it's the small companies that are the most creative. If you're looking for stability, strength and guaranteed delivery you want to go with a large organisation. For instance for our desktop management I'm certainly going to go with a large, substantial organisation. But if, for example, we want to break new ground in terms of how we handle digital files coming out of  new generation tapeless cameras, we would look at smaller organisations to pilot and innovate a solution."

Linwood says the biggest technical challenge the BBC will be looking to external vendors to solve will be the new demands placed on its corporate network, which now handles not just email and printing as it once did, but also telephony, video conferencing and broadcast media files. This means the corporation is reviewing its entire corporate networking strategy: "We're putting a whole raft of demands on the corporate network that it was never intended or designed for originally," says Linwood. "It has changed radically in the past few years and it will continue to change radically in the coming three to five years." He is also involved in reviewing the BBC's storage and data centre strategy following the corporation's move to IP-based networking and the fact that it is now moving digital files that have reached the terabyte level in terms of size. Linwood reveals that over the next three years, the BBC will need seven petabytes of additional storage, which creates massive technical challenges in terms of how it moves and stores that data.

A moveable feast

This complexity is increasing as the BBC becomes more divided across different locations - including the transfer of around 2500 staff from London to Manchester's state-of-the-art MediaCity complex in the Salford Quays development. Linwood describes some of the technical challenges this will create: "There are massive challenges around how we store data and how we move that data about. For instance the sports team can at times have around 100 live feeds coming in a day. We need to find ways that we can carry those live feeds across our network to Manchester." The Corporation is also moving staff into a new high tech facility it is developing as part of its current Broadcasting House headquarters off London's Regents Street. It hopes to complete the project by 2012 and the move was one of the reasons behind the restructuring of the Broadcast and Enterprise Technology area within the BBC's Future Media & Technology Division spearheaded by Linwood. He describes the changes he has made and how these will fit in with relocating staff to the new facility: "We looked at the overall delivery of technology services within the BBC and decided there was a number of things we could do. The first was rationalisation. We've put the broadcast support operation teams from news, audio, music and world service together to drive efficiency and reduce management overhead. This gives us greater flexibility because we can train those engineers up to work across all divisions so when people are ill or there is a peak in demand we can move those resources around. Part of the restructuring I did was ahead of the move (to the new Broadcasting House facility) because to deliver new technology services into that facility I need to support news, world service and audio music who will all be based there."

As well as 1100 IT staff based within the BBC, Linwood works closely with the many organisations to which the BBC outsources IT functions. He says that a "huge amount" of the corporation's IT is currently outsourced, for instance its playout services, all the distribution of content out to antenna and internal business systems, which are managed by Siemens. Linwood says he is currently carrying out a review of the corporation's outsourcing strategy to ensure it receives the best value and the highest quality services from its outsource partners: "What I'm looking at there is how to be smarter about how we outsource. It's very important to understand the criteria that drives outsourcing. We're refining that and trying to understand how the BBC will benefit from outsourcing. If there is a technical area that we don't have the skills for internally then it's better to outsource that to a technology specialist that really understands the technology. But one of the things we've learnt is that when you outsource you need to retain knowledge within the organisation of the service you've outsourced. That's about being a smart customer. You can't outsource something that you don't understand yourself. It's also about whether we use small companies versus big companies. So we have an overall review underway of our outsourcing strategies and how we take those forward."

Forward thinking

As part of Linwood's drive to increase efficiency within the organisation and to support an increasingly complex IT network, he is driving the standardisation of IT processes across the corporation and the development of an infrastructure that allows for the sharing of technology across multiple divisions and platforms. "The goal is to standardise as much as possible. We're also looking for opportunities to build platforms that are pan systems platforms and a service based architecture so that we can allow many different systems to use the same back-end services." Cloud computing would, says Linwood, answer many of the BBC's technology requirements in that sense, particularly when it comes to the BBC's own internal business systems: "We're looking at cloud for our internal systems because we believe that would enable a number of things for us. First of all we're looking at more flexible working for our employees in terms of how and where they do their jobs and how they access the systems. Cloud is a good way of doing that because it allows us to push the system beyond the bounds of the BBC so that somebody who is working from home or in a café can access all the systems they need to get the job done."

As a technology pioneer in so many areas, the BBC will stop at nothing to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to digital media. And Linwood says there's no better time to be at the helm of an organisation that is going through such dramatic changes behind the scenes: "I think, for me, the time has come when technology and media are really coming closer together. The BBC and the media industry as a whole is going through a huge transition as technology becomes more and more important in everything we do, and for me the huge excitement of the BBC is that it's the world's largest media organisation and where better to be when you're going through a transition like that."